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About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

I had requested the rental of the (TDK) DVD’s for Richard
Strauss’s 1911 opera “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (“The Woman without a Shadow”),
over a year ago and it stayed in the Netflix “very long wait” for a long time.

But suddenly I got it, as an extra over my quota, a two-disc
set. The performance is conducted by
Wolfgang Sawallisch, in 1992, at the Aichi Prefectural Art Theater in Nagoya,
Japan, with the Bavarian State Opera. The stage director is Ennosuke Ichikawa, and
soloists include Peter Seiffert (the emperor, and somewhat foppish). Luana
Devol, Marjana Lipovsek, and Alan Titus.

The libretto, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is controversial. A
particular Emperor has adapted a half-human wife as an empress. She is “without a shadow” meaning she cannot
bear him human heirs. But unless she
overcomes this obstacle within twelve moon cycles, the Emperor will himself
turn to stone, as his kingdom comes to an end.

Much of the plot concerns the intervention of the empress in
the lives of a dyer and his wife, who secretly does not want to have children;
so somehow there needs to develop a scheme for the empress to get that capacity
from her. Wikipedia gives all the
allegorical details, spread out over three acts. At the end of act two, the dyer (named “Barak”)
and his wife are swallowed by an earthquake, simulated on stage by red and blue
curtains, but survive.

At the end, the world is not a zero-sum game, and the
empress’s kindness gives her fertility without taking it from the other wife.

It’s possible to see this as a meditation on the moral
issues surrounding openness to procreation, the way the Vatican has spun
it. But some see Mozart’s “Magic Flute”
(May 3) that way.

The opera demands some bizarre effects, such as children
singing out of a frying pan, and a golden waterfall.

The music seems typical of Strauss, being chromatic and sometimes bordering on
polytonality. The opening seems to be in
the unusual key of G# Minor. The second
Act ends with the earthquake in a cacophonous B-flat minor. The orchestra is huge. In the last act, there
is some much that foreshadow’s "Peace Day” ("Friedenstag", which I have on Koch CD, and which is notorious for the gratuitous bombast at the very end) but the music dies down to a quiet ending in C.

I’ve seen Salome (in Dallas) and Elektra (in New York) in
opera houses. Other composers: I’ve seen Britten’s “Peter Grimes” in Dallas
and “Billy Budd” in Washington; Alban
Berg’s “Wozzeck” in New York and “Lulu” just on PBS.

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